Author: NicoleVasilevsky

Biocuration Exchange Fellowship

The International Society for Biocuration is pleased to announce Luana Licata, from the University of Rome Tor Vergata as the first recipient of the Biocuration Exchange Fellowship. During her fellowship, she will visit the Protein Function Team at EMBL-EBI and the Gene Annotation Team, UCL London, to learn Gene Ontology (GO) annotation.

The Biocuration Exchange Fellowship is a short-term fellowship to promote collaborations and exchanges between groups working in the field of biocuration. The fellowship funds the visit of a biocurator to another laboratory or organization with long experience in biocuration. This visit constitutes a unique opportunity to learn new methods, experience biocuration in different settings and/or in different fields, and to establish mutually beneficial collaborations across groups and disciplines.

More information on Biocuration Exchange Fellowship can be found here.

New ISB Executive Committee (2017-2018)

The election of the 2017 – 2018 ISB Executive Committee (EC) took place last October. Please join us again in giving a warm welcome to Nicole Vasilevsky and Rama Balakrishnan to the Executive Committee, and congratulating Sylvain Poux for his reelection.

Cecilia Arighi has been elected as the new Chair of ISB, Nicole Vasilevsky is the new Secretary, and Sandra Orchard continues serving as Treasurer for the 2017-2018 period. The Executive Committee is also composed by Suzanna Lewis, Peter McQuilton, Andrew Su, and Zhang Zhang. As always, please reach out to any of us on the ISB EC as your representatives. The official handover date for the new EC took place November 1st.

After many years of service to the Biocuration community as members of the ISB Executive Committee, we bid farewell to Melissa Haendel and Monica Munoz-Torres. We are thankful for their invaluable contributions to the improvement of the International Society for Biocuration.

We again would like to thank all the candidates for their time and effort in running for election, and of course, all the ISB members who voted. Your participation in the society’s activities is greatly appreciated. We would like to also thank this year’s volunteers which oversaw the electoral process:

  • 2017 Nominating Committee: Pascale Gaudet, Stanley Laulederkind,  Raja Mazumder, Elvira Mitraka, and Randi Vita.
  • Elections Officer: Mary Ann Tuli
  • Membership Officer: Lorna Richardson

Announcing the 2018 Biocuration Awards

The International Society for Biocuration (ISB) is happy to announce the 2018 Biocuration award. Next year, the ISB will give the Biocuration career award to a person who has made sustained contributions to the field of biocuration.

Biocuration Career Award

The Biocuration Career Award recognizes biocurators in non-leadership positions who have made sustained contributions to the field of biocuration. The recipient will be required to present a talk at the Biocuration 2018 Conference, with expenses paid by the ISB. The nominations will be reviewed by the ISB Award Committee, comprised of one member of the ISB’s Executive Committee (ISB-EC) and six (6) additional members from the wider biocuration community; these members were nominated by the ISB-EC based on diversity in area of expertise, organization type, role, and geographic location.

 Who can nominate and/or be nominated?

  • Any currently active ISB member may nominate anyone in the field of biocuration, whether the potential nominee is a member of ISB or not.
  • Members of the ISB can make no more than 1 nomination per award.
  •  Those who hold Principal Investigator or Group Leader positions are not eligible for the Biocuration Career Award.
  • Current members of the Executive Committee or the ISB Award Committee are not eligible for the awards.
  • Self-nominations will not be considered.

 How to submit your nomination:

  • Nominations should be sent via email to the award committee at intsocbio@gmail.com with the subject line “Biocuration Award Nominations”.
  • The nomination email should contain the following fields:
    • Nominator details (name, e-mail and affiliation, member of ISB);
    • Nominee details (name, e-mail and affiliation);
    • Short list of scholarly contributions (a maximum of 50 words);
    • Brief description of why you are recommending this person (a maximum of 350 words).
    • The recipient of the award will be invited to give a presentation at the upcoming International Biocuration Conference, in Shanghai, China, from 08-11 April 2018, with all expenses paid by the ISB.

Deadline for submitting nominations: 15 December 2017

Biocuration Career Description Survey

We encourage you to participate in the Biocuration Career Description Survey.

This survey aims to gather and analyze information about the field of biocuration. The resulting data will be aggregated, analyzed, and shared with the community. Our hope is that the results from this survey can be used to promote and inform scientists, students and newcomers about our field. No identifying information will be revealed in reporting results of this survey. The results will be shared with the community at the 2018 Biocuration conference and made available online. 

The survey should take less than 10 minutes to complete and can be found at http://bit.ly/BiocuratorCareerDesc